In a nation where half the 9 million population are children under 18, it was the daily images and stories of distressed children in the days after the earthquake that were the most striking.

Despite the triumphant pictures of children being rescued from collapsed buildings and reunited with relatives, the reality for many is very different.

For our programme, we attempted to update the situation of the nation's orphaned children. This video diary gives some of my first impressions at the end of a day spent with some of Port au Prince's street kids.

For those lucky enough to be taken in by one of Haiti's overflowing orphanages, there is the hope of a better future. I visited one where the pastor is doing his best to care for the children and give them the love and attention that they deserve.

Our programme, the Orphans of Haiti, is on BBC One, Monday 12 July at 8.30pm and for users in the UK it is then available on the BBC iPlayer.

We'd like you to enter the debate and give us your comment on the programme. Use this forum to share your thoughts.

She was chained by the neck on a balcony, having been taken in as a pet years earlier.

On our travels, we learned that this happens often. Baby orangutans are orphaned when their mothers are killed as logging and palm oil companies clear vast tracks of their natural habitat.

Some of our viewers have contacted us to ask what has happened to Melay.

The International Animal Rescue charity have told me that they are planning a rescue as soon as they have completed work on a permanent rescue centre they are building on a 40-acre site in Ketapang.

You can see pictures taken by Daily Mirror photographer, Roger Allen, which will help the IAR obtain the government permits needed to release her.

Meanwhile there has been some good news for Indonesia's orangutans.

Nestlé has said it will make the palm oil in its best-selling chocolate bars more eco-friendly, by promising to cancel contracts with any firm found to be chopping down rainforests to produce the palm oil it uses in KitKat, Aero and Quality Street.

This concession is a victory for Greenpeace. A three-month long public awareness campaign culminated with what new media watchers have deemed a coup on Facebook, along with a powerful spoof advert for KitKat on YouTube.

Their Facebook campaign prompted supporters to bombard Nestlé's own fan page with critical comments.

Nestle's initial reaction was to delete the unfavourable comments, but they soon backtracked and realised that this innovative use of social media had perhaps won the upper hand in the debate.

You can read an interesting analysis of the Greenpeace campaign here.

Their You Tube video attracted 1.5 million viewers. While it was temporarily deleted for legal reasons, it has now been re-published.

You can read more reports about this at the links below:

Independent: Online protest drives Nestlé to environmentally friendly palm oil

Greenpeace Social Media Campaign Forces Nestlé To Stop Using Unsustainable Palm Oil

Our examination of Indonesia's palm oil industry triggered a number of interesting online comments about deforestation, the future use of palm oil as an energy source, shopping habits, why palm oil is not listed on the ingredients of many household products and of course, the situation of the orangutans in Borneo.

Some of our viewers asked what happened to Melay, the orangutan chained to a pole that was featured in the programme.

During filming, we discovered Melay - an orphan taken as a pet by local people 10 years ago - as we returned from a trip to a palm oil concession.

As soon as I returned to the mainland and was able to e-mail, I sent a message to the International Animal Rescue charity giving the whereabouts of the chained orangutan.

Subsequently I also passed the information to another orangutan charity that works in West Kalimantan.

As I write, Melay has not yet been rescued but her owner told me that she is often moved around the river community, which could mean that finding her will prove difficult for rescue charities.

In response to questions about what the Indonesian government are doing to halt illegal deforestation, I put some of what we discovered to the country's Minister of Agriculture, Dr Suswono.

He assured me that if there is evidence of illegal development of palm oil plantations and clearing of high conservation forest he would take action. Panorama will provide the Indonesian authorities with all the evidence we discovered in order to aid their efforts.

Even the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil's European communications department thought it important to use this blog to draw viewers to what the RSPO is doing to increase the supply of sustainable oil.

With the general election coming up, some of the Panorama audience have also suggested that candidates seeking election should be asked for their views on palm oil use and labelling in the food that ends up on supermarket shelves here in Britain. Current Food Standards Agency rules allow for palm oil to be listed as vegetable oil on an ingredients list.

Those and many of the other comments that were sent to Panorama definitely provide plenty of food for thought on the subject.

Again, many thanks for taking the time to participate in our online discussion about Dying for a Biscuit.

I already knew from what I'd been told that it contained palm oil but it is not listed among the ingredients.

Six weeks later, I am on a flight to Indonesia, the world's second largest producer of palm oil. This is also home to the critically endangered Orang-utan.

I must admit that before I started looking at the issues of where palm oil comes from and the role it plays in the making of some of our most popular everyday products, terms such as deforestation, conservationist, biodiversity and environmentalist didn't speak to me - the average person - about what those words actually mean.

My journalistic journey to see rainforest that is supposed to be protected chopped down and the ground beneath burnt to make way for palm oil plantations would prove memorable.

People say, at times quite rightly, "Wow I'd love to do your job, jetting around the world seeing wonderful things and places".

And it is true that the experiences we have on the road are unpredictable and often exciting. They can also be dangerous, unwelcome and exhausting.

The palm oil industry in Indonesia does not like the way Westerners investigate their business practices - both journalists and NGOs (non-government organisations) have been deported in the past.

For this trip, producer Steve Grandison and I knew that we would have to tread carefully.

Our journey included the 14 hour flight to Singapore, a six hour layover before the two hour flight to Jakarta and then the onward two hour flight to Pontianak on the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo.

Once finally in place, I was soon to have my first meeting with the central character in Panorama's story - Dying for a Biscuit.

At an Indonesian government facility, I met Chingo, a young orang-utan that I embraced and tickled like a small child as I listened to him react and giggle.

I was truly surprised by how human-like this ape really is, reacting at times to my touch as my two-year-old little girl back home would.

We followed Chingo and another orang-utan called JoJo to the airport where he was transported in a cage, in the cargo hold for an hour's flight to Ketapang.

At the International Animal Rescue Centre in Ketapang I met a dozen more, orphaned baby orang-utans in cages. There's very little room for them to manoeuvre and stretch their limbs.

The veterinarians and volunteers here in Ketapang tell us that witnessing the killing of their parents - slaughtered in the deforestations process that makes way for the palm oil plantations - has left these young apes traumatised.

I do believe that I can see the pain, the sorrow, in their eyes.

I admire the care the volunteers give the orang-utans. They tell me they are teaching them basic survival skills in the hope that one day they might be able to return them to the wild.

But their natural habitat, the rainforest, is being lost at a rate of two football pitches every minute. I now can see first hand the impact palm oil production is having on Indonesian Borneo's orang-utans.

Manufacturers, including Unilever who make that Flora in my fridge, tell us that they use a blend of vegetable oils, including palm oil, which can vary depending on supply chain issues.

They say they comply with all UK labelling rules as set out by the Foods Standards Agency. Many told us they are attempting to source sustainable palm oil.

Unilever said it is committed to using sustainable palm oil in all its products by 2015, an ambitious goal given that today only 15% of its palm oil is from a sustainable source.

In the making of Dying for a Biscuit we have asked key figures in the industry if the steep price being paid by the orang-utans of Borneo in the pursuit of cheap palm oil is part of the reason it's not clearly listed as an ingredient in so many of our household products?

We will welcome your thoughts on our programme after it is broadcast on 22 February on BBC One. Please keep in touch.

"Sit down, sit up and look straight ahead," he said. "Put your feet flat on the floor, rest your palms on your knees and don't move."

On the chair I was sat on was a mat, and wired pads were stuck to my hands. I was told to raise my arms above my head so he could strap two coiled lengths of black plastic around my chest and abdomen.

An aneroid sphygmomanometer, otherwise known as a blood pressure measuring tool, was strapped around my right arm.

The cables were plugged into the laptop.

I was about to take the opening analysis for a polygraph test used by on sex offenders as part of a plan to manage them in the community after release from prison.

It is a new scheme being used in the Midlands to detect if sex offenders have breached their prison release conditions and is the latest tool in the authorities' arsenal to keep tabs on offenders in the community.

For example, if they are not allowed to go within a mile of a school, but do, and then answer 'no' during the test, their bodily reactions should give them away.

If the test signals that they are being untruthful, they will subjected to an investigation which could land them back in prison.

All those tested are also monitored under the Multi Agency Public Protection
Arrangement otherwise known as Mappa, a joint effort by police and probation services to supervise more than 50,000 sex offenders and violent criminals living in the community.

In Panorama: Freed to Offend Again we examine how this system - designed to protect us - actually works.

We meet the relatives of victims killed by monitored offenders, I go out with the police to meet a high-risk sex offender who claims he has changed and we gain exclusive access to a Mappa meeting as it decides the risk level of a man about to be released.

Each year the government publishes a report telling us the number of re-offences committed by 25% of those on the Mappa list deemed the most serious risks.

In its report for year from April 2007-March 2008, it was reported that only 79 serious further offences were committed by this group.

What they've not told us is the serious further offences committed by some of the other 75%.

Using freedom of information requests, we thought we'd try and find out. What we discovered was that, worrying, there were far more than the government has chosen to disclose.

Freed to Offend Again raises concerns that some offenders are not being monitored at the appropriate level and that those who are re-offending are not making it onto the official statistics released to the public.

The government says accuracy worries are behind a delay in plans to reveal the full re-offend figures among all of the Mappa offenders.

But not before I spent a number of years, in a number of different prisons and witnessed many drug deals and drug takers. I was there when the Mandatory Drug Test (MDT) was first introduced, back in 1996, so saw first hand the impact it had.

I had acquaintances that shifted from smoking cannabis to chasing the dragon, smoking heroin, in an attempt to avoid being caught by the MDT: A trace of heroin doesn't stay in your system as long as cannabis so the chances of being tested positively and punished were reduced.

My insight aside, the link between drugs, crime and prison is all too apparent. So what are the Government and prison service doing to break that link especially inside?
Many who work in this field argue if you can get criminals on drugs, off drugs, whilst they're serving a prison sentence the chance is they won't commit crime on the out to feed their habit. More than half of the 80,000-prison population test positive for drugs when entering jail.

The prison service spends more than 100 million a year on drug rehabilitation, but only 6 million is dedicated to disrupting the supply of drugs into prison.

So in "Smugglers' Tales" we ask if the prison service is doing enough to stop the flow of drugs and mobile phones getting into. We look at the technology and simple search methods.

Prisoners are not allowed mobile phones or use of the Internet. Prison officers are not even authorized to take their own mobile phones into prisons and anyone caught with one can be sentenced to 2 years inside.

Yet we have a couple of amazing stories where prisoners make phone calls from their cells using mobile phones. We hear a prisoner calling the police on a mobile from his cell trying to find out where a female prison officer is after she'd been arrested for attempting to bring him drugs.

There is a constant cat and mouse game played out by prisoners trying to get drugs, mobile phones or other contraband in and prison staff who are trying to keep it out.
I spent six days inside Woodhill Category A High Security prison in Milton Keynes, not as a prisoner this time, but as an observer.

The fact there were nearly 9,000 mobile phones and sim cards found in prisons last year, and nearly 5,000 individual drug seizures doesn't tell the whole story.

The prison services don't record the quantity or weight of each find, not all phones found are sent of for analysis and so the true extent of the problem is unknown.

The former head of prisons drugs strategy put the drug trade worth at 100 million a year. When I spoke with a prison source high up in security they put it at least 22 million.

There are five main routes for drugs to get into prisons: Visitors; corrupt staff; over the wall stuffed in dead pigeons or tennis balls; prisoners who attend court hearings expecting to go to jail and through the post.

We obtained some classic CCTV footage of drug handovers in visiting halls showing women pulling it out from between their legs and images of what look like parents, wives, friends and girlfriends slipping drug parcels to the prisoner.

It's a fact of life that there are drugs in every prison in the country.

The prison service accepts this and has a professional and motivated response, but it also recognizes it is a challenge that will need constant adaptation to match the ingenious methods used to get drugs and mobile phones in.

We met protesters who do not fit the image of what a lot of people might think an activist looks like.

Peter Harbour worked as a physicist all his adult life without a blemish on his record. Yet when he and other local people decided to challenge a power company's plans to fill in the last of their local countryside lakes with ash, a court issued them with an injunction that stopped them in their tracks.

The company, npower, said it had applied for the injunction because its staff were being harassed and threatened by activists connected to the squatters occupying an empty building on its land.

What's more, that injunction, naming six people including Mr Harbour, appeared on a police website dedicated to tackling domestic extremists - a development that frightened both Mr Harbour and many of the law-abiding locals. Although in the end their campaign was successful and the power company abandoned its plans, Mr Harbour was left shocked by the way he and his fellow campaigners were treated.

We also met Hannah McClure, a 21-year-old student and a veteran of several direct action campaigns. Hannah agrees that protesters are being treated unfairly. She told me that while she's been arrested for taking direct action on environmental issues, she was not prepared for what happened in a squat where about 80 demonstrators spent the night in an empty office building following the G20 protests in central London.

In Whatever Happened to People Power?, we show amateur video footage of the moment when 100 police officers stormed the building - two armed with Taser guns - threatening those inside.

On the tape you can hear the squatters' fear as one shouts out "They're going to kill one of us".

The police told us they behaved with justifiable caution as they did not know what to expect when they went into the building and had information that some inside were violent. In the end, only two of the squatters were arrested and neither has been charged with any offence.

In the programme, we look at these instances and others that raise questions about police tactics when dealing with protesters.

It's easy to understand the frustration and stress officers are put under when confronted by verbally aggressive protesters who scream and shout and swear inches from their faces as they hold a line at a demonstration.

The question I asked the Metropolitan Police's Assistant Commissioner was whether it was ever justified to punch a protester in the face, whack them with a baton or bash them with a riot shield - all examples that were caught on camera and appear in our programme.

The Met told me that officers are trained to use only appropriate force and are held accountable for their actions.

It is the use of force by the police, captured on camera and played out to the public via social networking sites that has damaged the public's confidence in the police - a point made in last week's Home Affairs Select Committee report on the G20.

The committee described the overall police operation as remarkably successful, but added that this was in part down to luck rather than judgement.

To find out more, watch Panorama: Whatever Happened to People Power?, BBC One, Monday, 6 July at 8.30pm.

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is leading the debate towards the idea of an earned amnesty for "irregular immigrants" who've been living in this country for a number of years.

This programme has taken me to meet 'illegals' living among us and in the shadows of our society. Having never reported a story on immigration I was open minded about what I would learn and what I would be able to share with you.

The first piece of information I really wanted to find out was, how serious a problem the Home Office are dealing with, how many illegal immigrants are there? I was able to put this to the Immigration Minister Phil Woolas. All I can say is that what he said surprised me, especially against the backdrop of the recent outcry about British jobs for British workers.

Some of the other stuff I discovered really did amaze me. I'm not giving anything away by telling you ahead of broadcast (scheduled for 9th March) that I could not believe illegal immigrants vote. Yes I said vote. Seems cheeky but they really consider themselves as part of our societies having dodged capture and removal for many years.

And that's likely to continue, if nothing else because of the sheer scale of the problem.

The National Audit Office estimate that the average cost of an enforced return is £11,000. A 2005 Home Office report stated that there were approximately 430,000 illegal immigrants in the UK, which means it would cost £4.7 billion to remove them.

Then of course there's the question of time. Last month the Home Office published figures which showed that for 2008 the total number of enforced removals and notified departures for asylum and non asylum cases was 21,110. So it would take 20 years to clear the 430,000 total.

This is one of the reasons some people are saying we need to try something else with those already here and tighten up the entry so no-one else can get in. Interesting debate.

It doesn't matter if that person they perceive to be black is in fact mixed race such as myself, of black Caribbean and white English origin. Most including the black community see me as black when in fact I consider that an insult to my mother who is not and played an important role in my life. But I gave up correcting them many years ago.

I wonder if the new president of America, Barack Obama, who too is mixed race, feels the same?

In my last programme Jailed for a Knife, four of the perpetrators I interviewed were black and one was white but that doesn't automatically make it a black issue. The issue was teenagers and knives. Is it fair to say that most knife crimes are committed by young black boys? Or that most of the teenagers that have died have been black? Those statistics are not readily available, but do we need them? You only have to look at the snapshots of the young men's faces printed in papers to see there's some truth in the argument.

What I wonder is, if the programme had featured four white teenagers and one black teenager would there be the reverse reaction?

Regarding the racial representation in the programme, as I indicated in the programme, I didn't speak to these young offenders on the basis of their race or where they came from. I spoke to them for their insight on why teenage boys and at times girls, are carrying knives. I wanted to meet young people at the heart of this debate - to challenge them about their behaviour, to throw light onto what had led to their crimes and to show other youngsters, who might be tempted to carry a knife, the consequences of doing so.

It was also important that I spoke to young offenders who are current prisoners, not former offenders who committed their crimes years ago. Peer pressure and recognition is a key aspect of the knife environment - the young men had to have an authenticity, if other young people are to take notice and listen to their testimony.

All of these young men put themselves forward as being willing to take part in a programme. In terms of the offenders included in the final programme they were there on the basis of their crime and sentence. It was important we got a range of offences and experiences to show how knife crime is varied in its nature. In no way were the offenders chosen on the basis of their race or ethnicity.

I was struck by the power of the young men's testimonies and how they came across as thoughtful articulate young men - quite the opposite of the stereotypical hoodie / thug which is often portrayed. We felt it was important that these voices - irrespective of race - should be heard and that their articulate interviews shouldn't be discounted either on the basis of race.

My aim for the programme was for other young people to hear the real voices and experiences of people like them, young men who lived in the 'real world' who could speak directly to them. This seems to have struck a chord with the audience as, at this point, more than 2300 requests have been made by schools, youth groups, police officers and prisons for a copy of the programme to be used in their discussions with other young people. So it looks as if the testimonies of the five young offenders have a real chance of making a lasting difference.

"Basically if I'd been attacked by people and they come at me with a knife as well if I've got a knife and just say alright, they're obviously gonna think twice about attacking me," one of the young men told me.

"If I didn't have a knife they'd think 'oh there's three of us, one of him, we can take him'. If they think 'oh there's three of us and he's got a knife', they're gonna think about it more; they're not gonna wanna get themselves hurt, even though I probably wouldn't even have used it on them," he added.

When asked why he carried a knife if he didn't intend to use it, the offender said:
"For protection, obviously I'd get it out if I was attacked and say 'alright come on then', that kind of thing, but I wouldn't wanna use it on someone intentionally, like intentionally go up to someone and use it."

The young man he stabbed and killed did not have a knife.In fact none of the knife offenders I interviewed were being threatened with a knife or any other weapon at the time they killed or wounded their victim. The offenders found it difficult to accept that the knife they carried was an offensive weapon rather than defensive.

This belief that brandishing a knife would deter attack is just one of the contradictions the young offenders expressed. Whilst they knew it was illegal to carry a knife, they told me they did not take the threat of the law seriously. Some said they were more concerned about the threat from other teenagers than the police.

It's not often that the prison service allows a journalist into a young offenders' institution to film interviews with teenagers that have committed such violent offences, but such is the concern about the numbers of teenagers carrying and using knives that every effort is being made to break the cycle of one teenager picking up a knife to defend himself from others carrying them.

In the cases of those interviewed for the programme it is too late to change things, but when asked what is the one thing that may have stopped them picking up a knife, they all said hearing firsthand experiences from someone who had been to prison for knife crime.

Although what Panorama did in going to speak to these young men may seem controversial to some - 90% of the 16-24 year-olds questioned for our poll on tackling knife crime said that hearing from young men like the ones I spoke to is useful in the fight against knife crime.

34 teenagers were reported to have died, 23 of those in London, but the official figures are still to be released.

No surprise then that the Metropolitan Police declared knife crime its number one priority.

National newspapers like The Sun and The Mirror started campaigns and petitions.

Politicians also moved up a gear and the Government took any opportunity to explain what they were doing. As part of their It Doesn't Have To Happen campaign, they invested millions in shock advertisement campaigns, including posters showing severed fingers and gaping wounds.

Much was reported about why there was a problem and what needed to be done. There was even some controversy about whether white knife victims received more media attention than black victims.

Former teenage gang members and many other practitioners and volunteers were consulted and quoted.

As I followed the reports it was the families of victims, who always gave the most compelling and emotional opinion and that made me question what more could be done.
Mary the mother of a 15 year old girl stabbed to death by a 17 year old girl wanted to meet her daughters' murderer. She told me she had forgiven her but wanted to ask her why she did it.

And that got me thinking...

I first approached the Ministry of Justice with a request to visit young knife offenders in the summer of 2008. At the time I wanted to make a programme to show other teenagers where they will end up if they carry or use a knife.

A few months later, just as I was beginning to feel the opportunity to get some answers for the families of some victims was going to be a tough door to open, the Ministry of Justice agreed to allow us to interview young knife offenders in their prison cells.

Once inside I found it tough.

I sat on the bed of a teenager serving life for killing another kid, hearing him explain why it happened; what he thinks would stop others picking up a knife; how sorry he is for what he's done and how now he has to face the consequences.

These knife killers and offenders offered a rare but important insight into how to deal with knife crime. They told me those caught with a knife should go to prison. In the programme they said it is the only way to teach them and others carrying a knife or using a knife is wrong.

But one of the questions they could not answer was how they were going to survive serving a long prison sentence. Some of the offenders I met during the initial meeting were serving minimum 15 to 25 years for their offence.

One of the boys told me he was 18 and wouldn't get out until he was in his mid thirties. He wondered how he would cope locked in a confined space for all those years; not being able to walk to the shop, do simple things like open a door for himself as prison gates and cell doors do not have handles, just locks.

The tragedy is that these offenders only truly realized the price they would pay for carrying a knife, after they went to prison. By then it was too late for them and the families of victims, as one offender recognized:

"To be honest I could say I'm sorry, but sorry's not gonna bring their son back...I can say sorry and I mean I'm sorry like for the boy's parents and his family coz now they've got one less person at the Christmas table, but sorry's not gonna bring their son back. I know, I know personally they're not gonna wanna hear, I know that, there's nothing more I can say. I am sorry but who's gonna wanna believe that."

Was I scared? What were they like? Suppose they held you captive? These are just some of the questions people asked me after the Panorama - Mission Impossible earlier this year. Time allowing, this blog will be my platform to answer those and lots more questions about the job I do as a reporter for Panorama on and off screen.

I also want to share more of the twists and turns I experience investigating and working a story. My next programme, for example, deals with many sensitive issues. I will come back to its content after it's broadcast in the New Year. Watch this space is such a cliché but let's see.

My name is Raphael Rowe and there are other bits on this site that tell you more about me if you're interested. I've never blogged before so I'm ticking away on this laptop with some excitement.

One thing's for sure, this new look Panorama site and the blogs from members of our team is a first so be gentle!